HP releases more Open webOS code, including System Manager and core apps

The company also revealed that Open webOS won't run on existing hardware.

HP has released the source code of the webOS platform’s core application stack. The company also opened the code of Luna, the webOS System Manager. The code is available for download from the GitHub project hosting site. The latest code drop was announced this week in a blog entry. Alongside details about the latest code, HP also discussed the roadmap of the Open webOS project.

Now that the source code of the relevant components has been made available as open source, HP is working toward a beta release of the Open webOS platform. Unfortunately, Open webOS won’t support existing webOS devices such as the Pre and Touchpad due to the large number of proprietary software components that they require.

"For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated," HP said in its blog post. "Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking, and lack of drivers for a modern kernel."

Existing TouchPad users can, however, take advantage of the webOS Community Edition, an open source fork of HP’s mobile platform based on webOS 3.0.5. The Community Edition will allow TouchPad users to continue improving the software experience for their device.

Luna, the System Manager, is a particularly significant part of the latest code drop. It is responsible for managing key parts of the platform user experience, such as the card view and launcher. It also hosts the WebKit framework that is used to render Enyo applications.

The current generation of webOS is largely built on top of the open source Qt development toolkit, using the QtWebKit HTML rendering engine. This allows Open webOS to benefit from Qt’s inherent portability; Qt’s Lighthouse system makes it exceptionally easy to bring up on new hardware platforms. As HP explains in its latest Open webOS blog post, the Open webOS platform has been overhauled to take advantage of the latest version of Qt. This will provide some performance and stability advantages.

Although HP doesn’t plan to build its own hardware for Open webOS in the near future, the company is still actively investing in the platform. The latest Open webOS blog post reveals that HP is looking to hire new developers to expand the team that is working on the platform.

Let's see... Timetable said Open webOS 1.0 would be in Beta by August. Now HP says Open webOS won't run on Touchpad at all.

And they didn't mention that the Linux Standard Kernel will NOT run on any of their devices waaaaay back in January when the roadmap was announced?

Which most of us in webOS land left as enthusiasts made the assumption that if not the handsets, there would be one final update for our Touchpads? NOT telling this to us is equivalent to lying: even if they didn't know it would work, a disclosure of this possibility at the start of the work would have tempered our interest in Open webOS. No, we get NOTHING. Not even the truth: winks and nudges just to milk that last $1,000 - $2,000 dollars out of us from the App Catalog to fuel development? Really?

Now I'm siding with the developers 100% now: with no devices capable of running Open webOS right NOW, this is all a big waste of time. Good luck finding a device to run this on.

Once again, HP lied to it's supporters. Just like it has the ENTIRE time it has owned Palm. Fool me once, shame on you.... fool me 12 times straight, I probably shouldn't trust my instincts in technology to follow any longer, let alone vote for the next president.

I'm not tired of it now, I'm just done. Completely. My next phone will have 12 keys, maybe a menu button. I might break the display by jamming a pen through it just to give it some personality. To hell with it all.

Which most of us in webOS land left as enthusiasts made the assumption that if not the handsets, there would be one final update for our Touchpads? NOT telling this to us is equivalent to lying: even if they didn't know it would work, a disclosure of this possibility at the start of the work would have tempered our interest in Open webOS. No, we get NOTHING. Not even the truth: winks and nudges just to milk that last $1,000 - $2,000 dollars out of us from the App Catalog to fuel development? Really?

It's like you didn't even read the article:

Quote:

Existing TouchPad users can, however, take advantage of the webOS Community Edition, an open source fork of HP’s mobile platform based on webOS 3.0.5. The Community Edition will allow TouchPad users to continue improving the software experience for their device.

Existing TouchPad users can, however, take advantage of the webOS Community Edition, an open source fork of HP’s mobile platform based on webOS 3.0.5. The Community Edition will allow TouchPad users to continue improving the software experience for their device.

I know Community Edition exists; I've been following that since webOS Nation showed us the videos of it back in June. Again, HP never said that Community Edition is the final release for Touchpad. Speaking of webOS Nation, I'm not alone in my sentiments. http://www.webosnation.com/open-webos-w ... s#comments

We, the last remaining fans, were still lied to as supporters. Try again.

I know Community Edition exists; I've been following that since webOS Nation showed us the videos of it back in June. Again, HP never said that Community Edition is the final release for Touchpad. Speaking of webOS Nation, I'm not alone in my sentiments. http://www.webosnation.com/open-webos-w ... s#comments

We, the last remaining fans, were still lied to as supporters. Try again.

webOS Nation (especially the comments) has become neigh unreadable because of sentiments and commenters like this. Palm/HP made a product, you bought it, they bungled it. Nobody ever promised to support it in perpetuity.

You now have the choice of enjoying some off-shoot of that product that you claim to be a fanatic of, buying something else, or exacting revenge on Leo Apotheker voodoo dolls. But don't expect sympathy for your myopia.

That means they plan on releasing the Open webOS Beta by the end of August. Nothing in the roadmap said anything about specific device support. Just that the code will be released. I agree it would have been better in many ways to do more than that, but that's not what they promised.

So far they are on track.

Being on track basically means nothing unless someone steps up and creates devices that will run it. Even then, it will be a huge uphill battle for that someone.

If I could easily switch the behavior of the home button on Android, I might agree. As it stands, the "long-hold" is just too long to wait for a sub-standard Card view knock-off. Just Type/Universal Search was pretty awesome, too, not to mention, anything based on HTML and JavaScript is a plus for all the web.

That means they plan on releasing the Open webOS Beta by the end of August. Nothing in the roadmap said anything about specific device support. Just that the code will be released. I agree it would have been better in many ways to do more than that, but that's not what they promised.

So far they are on track.

Being on track basically means nothing unless someone steps up and creates devices that will run it. Even then, it will be a huge uphill battle for that someone.

My point was that Open webOS would NOT run on Touchpad, and they chose until the end of the "roadmap" to mention that little detail. (Sorry if I wasn't clear on that in my first post.) I didn't say they were off-track at all: the beta is still on target. Just that it's useless to end users since it won't run on anything but an emulator right now.

ShlomoAbraham wrote:

webOS Nation (especially the comments) has become neigh unreadable because of sentiments and commenters like this.

Summed up as "fuck them and you." No problems there. Can't reason with judgement.

ShlomoAbraham wrote:

Palm/HP made a product, you bought it, they bungled it. Nobody ever promised to support it in perpetuity.

I never said I wanted that. One year would be nice, but forever?

ShlomoAbraham wrote:

You now have the choice of enjoying some off-shoot of that product that you claim to be a fanatic of, buying something else, or exacting revenge on Leo Apotheker voodoo dolls.

That would be creating a false dilemma, summed up to two choices: "Be a dick" (combining "off-shoot" and the voodoo), or shut up and get something else. Just say it, man.

ShlomoAbraham wrote:

But don't expect sympathy for your myopia.

Once more, I never said I wanted that. I'm within speaking my peace about the current affairs of my mobile OS of choice. You didn't have to reply to me, but you did, and did so in a thread with less that 20 responses to it which says enough: tech actually dies when apathy takes hold. If that's the point you're trying to drive home, silence says everything you'd ever want it to about webOS.

And that's all else I'll offer on the subject. If I post again in this thread, may Ars Technica ban me forever. Have fun spending the next replies writing paragraphs about picking apart my proclivities and failings further. It's wasting your time more than it is mine.

I was once a former TouchPad owner, and I was kinda expecting Open webOS to work on the TouchPad. I can't say I'm really surprised, but I'm really not sure where they're trying to go with it if they won't even adopt it on their own hardware, let alone convincing someone else to adopt it on theirs.

If I could easily switch the behavior of the home button on Android, I might agree. As it stands, the "long-hold" is just too long to wait for a sub-standard Card view knock-off. Just Type/Universal Search was pretty awesome, too, not to mention, anything based on HTML and JavaScript is a plus for all the web.

This read like Maemo all over again. Sure the top layers are open for anyone to play with. But it can't be truly community maintained for existing hardware because there are blobs everywhere that are never to be opened and so locks the kernel version one can work with.

Having experienced that up close, one can grasp where RMS gets his drive from.

You now have the choice of enjoying some off-shoot of that product that you claim to be a fanatic of, buying something else, or exacting revenge on Leo Apotheker voodoo dolls.

That would be creating a false dilemma, summed up to two choices: "Be a dick" (combining "off-shoot" and the voodoo), or shut up and get something else. Just say it, man.

uninventiveheart wrote:

ShlomoAbraham wrote:

But don't expect sympathy for your myopia.

Once more, I never said I wanted that. I'm within speaking my peace about the current affairs of my mobile OS of choice. You didn't have to reply to me, but you did, and did so in a thread with less that 20 responses to it which says enough: tech actually dies when apathy takes hold. If that's the point you're trying to drive home, silence says everything you'd ever want it to about webOS.

webOS didn't die because of apathy. The webOS Nation community is clearly not apathetic. It failed on a technical and commercial level against an incredibly well entrenched competitor. I've bought 3 webOS devices (Pre, FrankenPre2 which I made, TouchPad), and I would be outright lying if I recommended them to a general consumer above their iOS equivalents.

If webOS were to ever recover from failing multiple times in multiple ways, it will not be because of a rancid, whiny, 'HP Lied, webOS died' community, it will be because of talented and creative people working hard to revive it. Those people will mostly be inside of HP, as the article mentions, or they will be people outside of it, like the Internals team. But you don't hear Rod Whitby running around cursing HP for lying.

I don't know why HP is continuing this work. They're continuing development on an OS that has been a commercial failure without any hardware support, or (known) hardware partners. iOS, Win8, and Android, all have stronger communities and stronger companies backing them which should scare off any hardware partners. Build it and they will come tends to only work in movies.

In summary, enjoy what you can, don't rue what you can't. Negativity won't help anybody here, least of all yourself.

Sigh... what a disappointment. I've had a Pre3 for about a year now, and have been oscillating between loving it and wanting to eject it from my sunroof at highway speed. 2.2.4 just has so many little issues that collectively chafe... I really wanted open webos to drop in and carry on.

I'll stick around awhile longer to see what the tireless fanatics can make happen, and try to help, but it's officially time to give up and put this phone on my shelf of interesting/sad product failures.

Sigh... what a disappointment. I've had a Pre3 for about a year now, and have been oscillating between loving it and wanting to eject it from my sunroof at highway speed. 2.2.4 just has so many little issues that collectively chafe... I really wanted open webos to drop in and carry on.

I'll stick around awhile longer to see what the tireless fanatics can make happen, and try to help, but it's officially time to give up and put this phone on my shelf of interesting/sad product failures.

Time to get comfortable with android or iOS.

Funny thing is the closest to webOS in form and functionality might actually be windows phone 8.

Sigh... what a disappointment. I've had a Pre3 for about a year now, and have been oscillating between loving it and wanting to eject it from my sunroof at highway speed. 2.2.4 just has so many little issues that collectively chafe... I really wanted open webos to drop in and carry on.

I'll stick around awhile longer to see what the tireless fanatics can make happen, and try to help, but it's officially time to give up and put this phone on my shelf of interesting/sad product failures.

Time to get comfortable with android or iOS.

Funny thing is the closest to webOS in form and functionality might actually be windows phone 8.

I disagree somewhat. WP7/8 are visually striking with flat, simple shapes and no borders, and lots of text. It's pleasant enough to use, certainly, but webOS is still relies on notions of real-life materials: glass, metal, texture, etc. And webOS's task switching concept is still unrivaled in my opinion.

I might sound a little grim/cynical, but it's basically the difference between a road sign and a gravestone, and each makes a great case for their design philosophies.

Used a Touchpad over the weekend and fell in love with proper task switching all over again.

It's great to see Luna out finally. Card view is best in class, I don't care who you are. Fat chance of iOS picking it up, but if it wound its way into Android, we might be cooking.

Card view exists in Android, just hit the "task switcher" softkey. It's faster and more usable.

Really, once I put CM9 on my touchpad, I wondered why I'd waited so long, and wondered why anyone still bothers with WebOS. Apps aside, android just runs far better on the same hardware. WebOS might look a bit nicer with the touch ripple and other eye candy, but you soon find out that it's frosting on a shit cake.

So.... it doesn't run on anything and it isn't going to run on the Touchpad.

Well, at least Android runs on it! Now if they could just stabilize the wifi. Would switch entirely to Android if it was just a little more stable. They did great work on that port for an alpha version tho.

This read like Maemo all over again. Sure the top layers are open for anyone to play with. But it can't be truly community maintained for existing hardware because there are blobs everywhere that are never to be opened and so locks the kernel version one can work with.

Having experienced that up close, one can grasp where RMS gets his drive from.

A privileged upbringing and no real-world responsibilities to worry about?

It's open source, which means it can't die so long as anyone has interest in it. There's been a lot of frustration in the open source development community with Google not releasing code on time, closed development, etc. WebOS promises to be probably the first fully open mobile OS. Bryan Lunduke, formerly of The Linux Action Show, once pleaded for a mobile OS that was truly open and wasn't under the control of one company with the power to kill it (like Nokia did to Maemo/Meego). WebOS fits the bill. Open WebOS will be developed to run under the Linux kernel. The Android and Linux kernels have merged again, which means anything that runs newer Android will be able to run Open WebOS! This will allow users to install it on anything that can handle Android (which is a lot of things), so how does it have no future? The future I see is a developed in the open, full source code available mobile OS with no need to root or jailbreak that will let users be in complete control of their own devices. I'm excited!

A couple of weeks ago, I reverted to webOS as my daily driver on the touchpad. Though this was initially a move.driven by necessity--extremely frustrating wifi issues at work with CM9--I find myself really enjoying webOS again. If it had a better browser than Advanced browser I'd very rarely feel the need to fire up Android. Swiping up from the bottom edge is so satisfying! And that battery life, oof